Archives

Next we sell off naming rights for schools – REPLAY

Private business promoters aim to eliminate public enterprises through privatization, contracting out and outsourcing. They promote the myth that delivery of services by private, often multinational, companies gains cost and service efficiencies. Thus, BC Liberals, obedient clients to business masters, degrade public agencies and support quasi-public mongrels such as Community Living BC, author of the Ridge Meadows recycling fiasco.
Accountability is unclear so politicians believe they are shielded from blame for failures. Agencies serve another political purpose because loyal party supporters can be rewarded at public expense with untendered contracts and lucrative sinecures outside the professional civil service.

Preference for services to be delivered to the public by private corporations is a matter of bias, often founded on selective evidence. There is no intrinsic reason why a global business with foreign headquarters and a shady history, Accenture for example, should be more efficient and effective than a crown corporation or public agency, provided the latter is not crippled by people or policies imposed for non-business reasons.

Private enterprises, perhaps because of their focus on maximizing profits, have been associated with wrongdoing in delivering essential social services. For example, ProPublica reported on:

how two [Pennsylvania] judges there carried out a scheme in which they took $2.8 million in kickbacks from a private juvenile prison company in exchange for lengthy sentences.

The Economist examined the operation of private prisons in the USA and found:

that firms in the prison business reap profits by billing government for rather more than their initial lowball estimates while scrimping in ways that may make prisons less secure.

A generation ago, public education was intended to provide universal access, allowing roughly equal prospects for betterment to citizens. Now, according to Christy Clark, the government’s focus will not be on delivering the best possible education to learners, instead it will promote a market driven, for-profit education industry, recruiting wealthy students from overseas.

We already have substantial private initiatives in secondary level schooling. For example, West Vancouver School Board offers academic and sports programs to international students. Regular students may be subsidizing this effort through foregone services and attention. There is so little transparency that taxpayers can not be certain whether the focus on fees paying foreign students is hurtful to resident children. It is clear though that ancillary social costs for policing, transit, healthcare and other public services are excluded from WVSB’s financial analysis, the burden simply left for taxpayers at provincial and federal levels to shoulder. Other school districts pursue similar commercial objectives.

This week Premier Clark announced that more BC students will be elbowed aside in a campaign to further commercialize our schools. She aims:

to increase the number of post-secondary students from other countries studying in B.C.

The intended commercialization of schools is not a considered program of educators, it is a wedge, created for the future benefit of private entrepreneurs. It is the dream of some to covert British Columbia’s public school system into an agency to educate only the poor and disadvantaged, the children of little commercial value, while the remaining children take taxpayer provided payment vouchers to private schools of choice.

Supporters of public education need to realize they’re in the middle of a war for its future, and they’re losing.

The Fraser Institute’s school report-card program is merely the opening salvo in a campaign to strip public education of its funding and direct the resources to the private and nonprofit sectors.

…Lost in the debate are the goals of universally accessible, publicly funded education, such as preparing children for citizenship, cultivating a skilled work force, and developing critical-thinking skills.

The next step in the BC Liberal plan may be to sell naming rights to school buildings and school programs. You won’t send your child to kindergarten at Adams Road Elementary School. It will be to the McDonalds Introduction to School Program at the Walmart Family Education Center.

Post navigation

Yes the privitization of the highways is working so well. At this rate it will cost more than the ferries from the Island to travel anywhere in BC by the time the tolls are all in place. The private companies maintaining the highways only do half the job our old BC highways depsrtment did. What a comedown. Privatize everything then we will really lose our province.

The idea of selling school naming rights to corporations is not farfetched. Lion's Gate Hospital on the North Shore has numerous rooms and facilities named for financial contributors.

While being serviced at the Craftsman Collision Cast Clinic, which is near the Jim Pattison Emergency Centre, I was directed to sit in the George and Margaret Hoar waiting area to await radiology services. I can't remember all the names but sponsorship signs are all over the hospital.

I visited Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island on my way back from Long Beach, and happened upon an elementary school there that had a playground “town” of tiny shack-like buildings each sporting the name of a business.

Presumably these businesses had “donated” funds for these tacky shacks, but the corporate names on these “tiny town” buildings were affixed as if they were the names of stores.

So kiddies can learn real early that their mission is to shop, shop, shop, and that their great benefactors are corporations, not their moms and dads who pay the bulk of the cost through their tax dollars. Some lesson they're learning in civic politics, eh?

Wasting money on destructive energy projects makes zero sense when there are better alternatives. British Columbia is spending billions on Site C. It could suspend the project today and have less harmful and cheaper sources of clean power operational by the time more electricity is needed.

As is typical of resource management, the regulating ministry sees its prime purpose is to enhance growth and profitability of companies extracting resources. the public share of produced values is no longer material. This cozy relationship costs taxpayers billions of dollars, money that could be spent on renewable energy, transit, daycare, education or many […]

Canada’s Conservatives are committed to the Republican Party value of opposing voter fraud, if someone else is doing it. Like their American mentors, HarperCons protest electoral manipulations even more strongly when no one is doing it. Bill C-76 amends the Canada Elections Act to establish spending limits for third parties and political parties before of a […]

Freelance reporter Bob Mackin wrote that BC’s Legislature was a scandal waiting to happen and he quoted journalism professor and former Legislative reporter Sean Holman about the significant potential for abuse. Mackin blames excessive secrecy and lack of transparency...

BC Hydro's quarterly report for the period ended September 30, 2018 shows the utility is very good at some things. Specifically, borrowing and spending money. In the thirteen years from 2005, assets employed to service BC consumers have almost tripled in value. Trouble is, actual sales to residential, commercial and industrial consumers are less in 2018 […]

The case is clear. British Columbia's Government decided to reduce the public share of natural gas revenues to almost nothing. This is despite substantial growth in the quantities of natural gas being extracted.

Perhaps an even more vile set of falsehoods is BC Hydro's continuing claims that demand for electricity by its BC consumers has been growing steadily. That has led to excessive capital spending that measures in the billions.

Check out the fine work on electoral reform by Merv Adey 2018 fellowship recipient Andrew Seal. It’s a fabulous five part series published by The Tyee. We’d like to raise additional funds to initiate the next fellowship. You can be sure it will support a comprehensive examination of a subject important to all British Columbians.